Culture

Last week, I drew a word picture about the outrageous growth of the federal government and its cadre of domineering agencies. I likened them to a bad case of acne. At issue was the BLM’s charges against members of the Hammond family who are facing sentencing under Bill Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

Some people thought the word picture was too disgusting. I actually don’t think it was strong enough. After all, most of us outgrew our teenage acne problems. So my comparison makes it seem as though these agencies aren’t that bad because we all survived our adolescent bouts with acne.

It turns out acne does’t invoke the powerful imagery that is necessary to illustrate the fatal nature of these tyrannical bureaucracies. Acne is not terminal and is nothing like the plague, small pox or Ebola. Today’s federal intrusions are more serious, more akin to a metastasizing cancer.

As eMails fly around the Web supporting the Hammond family, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) shows a striking resemblance to a bad case of acne. My suggestion is that the BLM needs a thorough scrubbing.

A blind pimple is a red, painful, raised area that does not yet show the soft white head of a facial Vesuvius which is about to explode. Pimples are caused by overactive glands which are producing excess oil. When the skin’s pores become clogged, the debris builds and pimples form.

On one’s face the results are quite common, although extremely frustrating.

Special interest lobbyists across America have essentially gutted our Republic. They have become so adept at picking through the bones of our public treasury that they behave more like ravenous wolves than Sons of Liberty.

Yesterday’s House budget deal, delivered by the new Speaker Paul Ryan is nothing but a John Boehner organized Republican blessing on all of Obama’s artful designs. This budget deal, like others over the past 20 years will ensure continual federal debt and deficits while driving the federal leviathan toward complete dysfunction.

Butchers at the Meat Mart

Politicians, in both parties, act more like butchers than representatives as they wield their tools. They specialize in separating the tender morsels of meat stock from the remainder of the carcass. Their self-serving promotional pieces and basic handouts look like the sections of a butchered beef cow.

Last Friday, I was on Bill Meyer’s Radio Show discussing the KBRA/KHSA agreements. Bill asked Klamath County Commissioner Tom Mallams, former Shasta Nation Vice Chairman Gary Lake, and myself to provide insight to the apparent support for dam removal from Oregon’s only Republican House member Greg Walden.

Unfortunately for Rep. Walden, he can’t have it both ways. He can’t pretend to work for rural American values while flushing our property rights and precious fresh-water resources into the Salty Pacific.

Not only does the KBRA and KHSA take water resources from Klamath and Siskiyou counties and the Rogue Valley, but it sets precedence throughout the United States. These measures, if successful, will instruct others on how to successfully use political power to transfer private wealth into collective interests' pockets. The KBRA/KHSA represents the classic "Divide and Conquer" paradigm: tribes against agriculture, project irrigators against non-project irrigators, wind and solar interests against ratepayers, business cronyism against taxpayers, and finally, the Endangered Species Act against the rest of us.

Notorious crime and violence are typically experienced in the midst of war. We are accustomed to seeing images of it in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Syria. Many Americans dealt with it in Vietnam, and Korea and our parents experienced it first-hand during World War II.

Additionally, far too many Americans living in our inner city neighborhoods experience the senseless violence and murder of their children. Shockingly, this can also happen in small, rural communities in the Pacific Northwest.

In Roseburg, Oregon last week, a killer accomplished horrendous evil at Umpqua Community College. The nine victims who died in the massacre ranged in age from 18 to 67, crossing five different generations of friends, family members and loved ones.

The EPA’s recent actions prove beyond any doubt that the organization is a rogue agency operating in a capricious and unlawful manner and it ought to be defunded.

Last month’s 3 million gallon spill of toxic mine waste into the Animas River is a perfect example of the EPA’s gross negligence and derogation of the rule of law. The Aug. 5 mine breach, sent millions of gallons of bright yellow, heavy-metal-contaminated water and sediment gushing into the Animas River.

That waste then flowed into the San Juan River, and eventually flowed into New Mexico and poured into Utah's Lake Powell.

“From the moment of conception, the unborn has a human nature. That he cannot yet speak, reason, or perform personal acts means only that he cannot yet function to the degree we can, not that he lacks the essential nature that makes those functions possible in the first place.”

Executive Focus

President Obama has both eyes focused on completing his “fundamental transformation” of America. As a statist, he believes in the power and authority of the government to regulate and control every aspect of our lives.

Even Alexander Hamilton, an ardent proponent of federal control, recognized the pitfalls of power concentrated in government.

“The instruments by which it must act are either the authority of the laws or force. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government, there is an end to liberty!